Good find Qubit but i think Amazon will cancel your order rather than ship it at that price. As a warning - I never buy from Amazon if a product is NOT in stock - they can take forever to get it and wont tell you if they have no intention of getting it.

And despite what Nvidia PR say - these cards are in short supply - not just selling fast.

Thats the best price I have seen around if it stays at that, otherwise the best I can find is around £379. Could I ask though why you are considering a 580 over two HD 6850's? I only ask because they are similar in performance (at 1900 x 1200 the 6850's are 8% faster than a 480) but you can get 2 of those babies for £260..... I have been pondering over a Xmas present and am not sure which way to go, I do like the single card solution and the 580 looks awesome however it's difficult to ignore the huge savings involved

Thats the best price I have seen around if it stays at that, otherwise the best I can find is around £379. Could I ask though why you are considering a 580 over two HD 6850's? I only ask because they are similar in performance (at 1900 x 1200 the 6850's are 8% faster than a 480) but you can get 2 of those babies for £260..... I have been pondering over a Xmas present and am not sure which way to go, I do like the single card solution and the 580 looks awesome however it's difficult to ignore the huge savings involved

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That's a fair question over the dual GPUs. I'd rather have the 580 because:

- I currently prefer nvidia. I like the driver interface more* and their cards seem to have less glitches and hitches in games. It's not about outright performance this one. If AMD had a faster card, I'd still get nvidia

- I'm not keen on dual GPU setups (of either brand) and the known issues with them such as scaling, noise and power usage

Ironically, my board has Crossfire support (see specs) and I did run two HD3850 X2's on it in glorious Quadfire... and performance was significantly less than my GTX 285. But I bought those cheap to play with, so it doesn't particularly matter.

*I don't like the driver interface, because they got rid of the standard menu tree on the left hand side and instead force the user to constantly click the top left to make the menu appear, every time you want to navigate the menu tree, which is really irritating. All they had to do was give an option to switch this "feature" off, problem solved.

Also, the interface doesn't have nearly as many 3D options as nvidia or user configurable game profiles. This seems strange to me, as they are nvidia's primary competitor.

Oh and you'll have to stop teasing me with those Christmas lady avatars - they're so hot I can't think straight.

Ironically, my board has Crossfire support (see specs) and I did run two HD3850 X2's on it in glorious Quadfire... and performance was significantly less than my GTX 285. But I bought those cheap to play with, so it doesn't particularly matter.

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You would have been bottle necking the two HD3850x2's you'd need a cpu like a Q6550 or i7.

2x HD3850x2 can out perform cards such as a gtx480 or hd5870 when not bottle necked.

You would have been bottle necking the two HD3850x2's you'd need a cpu like a Q6550 or i7.

2x HD3850x2 can out perform cards such as a gtx480 or hd5870 when not bottle necked.

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If the 3850's are running slower than the 285, how can it possibly be a CPU bottleneck? Incidentally, with just one of those, the performance was even worse, which isn't surprising.

If the CPU was limiting performance, I would have seen the same or slightly higher performance with the 3850 quad setup. Performance was lower across the board, with all games. Performance was basically rubbish.

It's a shame that chart doesn't show you 2x 3850X2. I believe these are quite a bit less powerful than the 3870X2, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

I know you're thinking of the driver overhead with the xfire setup, but it didn't seem to me that this was limiting the CPU and unfortunately, I don't have a more powerful computer to test this out objectively.

You would have been bottle necking the two HD3850x2's you'd need a cpu like a Q6550 or i7.

2x HD3850x2 can out perform cards such as a gtx480 or hd5870 when not bottle necked.

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Pedantic man to the rescue.... d'you mean a Q6600 or Q9550?

I'm very much like you Qubit, I won't ever go dual cards unless the power consumption and physical profiles of the cards are exactly what I want; thin and efficient. I've never been impressed with the performance of dual cards and the copious amounts of issues that come with running dual cards puts me right off.

A tenner over £300 for a GTX580 is f'ing awesome. I lost faith in nVIDIA after they screwed the nForce 3 (and ever other chipset after it) up. Can't say I've been impressed with any nVIDIA card since the 8800GT(S). I'll be interested to hear your thoughts once you get it.

I'm very much like you Qubit, I won't ever go dual cards unless the power consumption and physical profiles of the cards are exactly what I want; thin and efficient. I've never been impressed with the performance of dual cards and the copious amounts of issues that come with running dual cards puts me right off.

A tenner over £300 for a GTX580 is f'ing awesome. I lost faith in nVIDIA after they screwed the nForce 3 (and ever other chipset after it) up. Can't say I've been impressed with any nVIDIA card since the 8800GT(S). I'll be interested to hear your thoughts once you get it.

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As you can see, the order was cancelled by Amazon.

I know what you mean about losing faith. Frankly, neither AMD nor nvidia are blameless - what about that bumpgate scandel at nvidia and all those bloody product launches that were just renames?

It's sort of a duopoly now, isn't it? However, as there isn't a third player to choose from I have to pick one of them and at the moment it's still nvidia overall.